Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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directly in commerce, many wealthy senators circumvented the law by
operating their estates as commercial farms. The total area under Roman
cultivation continued to expand as the transformation from subsistence
farming to agricultural plantations reshaped the Italian countryside.
The land fared poorly under these vast farming operations. In the first
decade ad the historian Titus Livius wondered how the fields of central
Italy could have supported the vast armies that centuries before had fought
against Roman expansion—given the state of the land, accounts of Rome’s
ancient foes no longer seemed credible. Two centuries later Pertinax
offered central Italy’s abandoned farmland to anyone willing to work it for
two years. Few took advantage of his offer. Another century later Diocletian
bound free farmers and slaves to the land they cultivated. A generation
after that, Constantine made it a crime for the son of a farmer to leave
the farm where he was raised. By then central Italy’s farmers could barely
feed themselves, let alone the urban population. By ad 395 the abandoned
fields of Campagna were estimated to cover enough land to have held more
than 75,000 farms in the early republic.
The countryside around Rome had fed the growing metropolis until late
in the third century bc. By the time of Christ, grain from the surrounding
land could no longer feed the city. Two hundred thousand tons of grain a
year were shipped from Egypt and North Africa to feed the million people
in Rome. Emperor Tiberius complained to the Senate that “the very existence
of the people of Rome is daily at the mercy of uncertain waves and
storms.” 6 Rome came to rely on food imported from the provinces to feed
the capital’s unruly mobs. Grain was shipped to Ostia, the closest port to
Rome. Anyone delaying or disrupting deliveries could be summarily
executed.
North African provinces faced constant pressure to produce as much
grain as possible because political considerations compelled the empire to
provide free grain to Rome’s population. The Libyan coast produced copious
harvests until soil erosion so degraded the land that the desert began
encroaching from the south. The Roman destruction of Carthage in 146
bc, and its salting of the surrounding earth to prevent its resurrection are
well known. Less widely appreciated are the longer-term effects of soil
degradation when the growing Roman demand for grain reintensified cultivation
in North Africa.
The Roman Senate paid to translate the twenty-eight volumes of Mago’s
handbook of Carthaginian agriculture salvaged from the ruined city. Once
the salt leached away, land-hungry Romans turned the North African coast
graveyard of empires